utch salute and exchange the news with lazy mutual
tolerance. The British are storekeepers and men of business; the Boers
ride in from their farms. They are big, bearded men, loose of limb,
shabbily dressed in broad-brimmed hats, corduroy trousers, and brown
shoes; they sit their ponies at a rocking-chair canter erect and easy;
unkempt, rough, half-savage, their tanned faces and blue eyes express
lazy good-nature, sluggish stubbornness, dormant fierceness. They ask
the news in soft, lisping Dutch that might be a woman's; but the lazy
imperiousness of their bearing stamps them as free men. A people hard to
rouse, you say--and as hard, when roused, to subdue.

A loitering Arcady--and then you hear with astonishment that
Burghersdorp is famous throughout South Africa as a stronghold of
bitter Dutch partisanship. "Rebel Burghersdorp" they call it in the
British centres, and Capetown turns anxious ears towards it for the
first muttering of insurrection. What history its stagnant annals record
is purely anti-British. Its two principal monuments, after the Jubilee
fountain, are the tombstone of the founder of the Dopper Church--the
Ironsides of South Africa--and a statue with inscribed pedestal complete
put up to commemorate the introduction of the Dutch tongue into the Cape
Parliament. Malicious comments add that Afrikander patriotism swindled
the stone-mason out of L30, and it is certain that one of the gentlemen
whose names appear thereon most prominently, now languishes in jail for
fraud. Leaving that point for thought, I find that the rest of
Burghersdorp's history consists in the fact that the Afrikander Bond was
founded here in 1881. And at this moment Burghersdorp is out-Bonding the
Bond: the reverend gentleman who edits its Dutch paper and dictates its
Dutch policy sluices out weekly vials of wrath upon Hofmeyr and
Schreiner for machinating to keep patriot Afrikanders off the oppressing
Briton's throat.

I went to see this reverend pastor, who is professor of a school of
Dopper theology. He was short, but thick-set, with a short but shaggy
grey beard; in deference to his calling, he wore a collar over his grey
flannel shirt, but no tie. Nevertheless, he turned out a very charming,
courteous old gentleman, well informed, and his political bias was
mellowed with an irresistible sense of humour. He took his own side
strongly, and allowed that it was most proper for a Briton to be equally
strong on his own. And this is m